Opinion

Testimony at the House re: local self-government

Douglas Darrell
NHCRN Board Member
Center Barnstead
To the editor, 

This is a very important bill that’s coming up for a vote in the [New Hampshire] House this week. It is about our future and vision that needs to be realized. This needs all the peoples support. We the people will vote on this in 2020 election. Amendment for an Article 40. My name is Douglas Darrell. This s my plea.

In support of CACR 8, March 6th, 2019 Testimony

Good day ladies and gentlemen of the Municipal and County Government Committee and the House of Representatives. I appreciate this moment to testify my support for CACR 8.

My name is Doug Darrell and have lived in Barnstead, New Hampshire these past 36 years with my wife Gail and raised four children. My wife Gail E. Oakes Darrell with the citizens of Barnstead, passed the first rights-based ordinance in New Hampshire back in 2006 to protect our groundwater from commercial, for profit, extraction destined for export. Called the “Water Rights and Local Self Government Ordinance” was the beginning of a movement that recognized the rights of citizens to be able to make these decisions in strengthening the right to protect our health, safety and welfare. It was an understanding that clean water being a common resource that all people recognize as essential to a healthy environment and sustaining all life where we live. This movement of right to local self-government has been termed a home rule bill which is inaccurate.

This model of local self-government has reached out in communities across the state and this nation as a means to address assaults by corporate projects that threaten the communities of people where they live. Regulatory law does not always protect health, safety and welfare and at times legalizes the harms of corporate activities which is the violation of chaos permitted.

This leads me to the why for an Amendment 40 to be achieved through this legislative hearing process and brings forth these essential points. These are a list of the debated questions brought to all of our attention:

1. Who decides and do people in the towns where they live have these inalienable rights of self-government?

2. When a private for profit interest entity, permitted project to take away from a community(municipality), imposing an act in degradation, sacrificing health, safety and welfare, who decides whether such projects move forward?

3. Through a petitioned warrant article passed at town meeting, an ordinance, democratically agreed by ballot, who decides?

4. Where is the republican form of government and the consent of the governed when a court justice reinterprets the 14th Amendment personhood clause to a personhood privilege of a corporate body? There isn’t supposed to be any privileged class person but all share equality individually the same.

Should there be a patchwork of laws to accommodate an unwanted private interest of corporate projects? All law is founded in the protections granted in the New Hampshire Constitution and Bill of Rights to guard against iniquities and protect their constituents fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Are there protections of a ceiling pre-emption through Dillon’s Rule* to prevent a violation against the civil rights of real people by a corporate contract that threatens health, safety and welfare of a municipality? Or does Dillon’s Rule pre-emption legitimize harms by the taking of 14th Amendment corporate personhood right? Is the contractual agreement being the permit issued by the state, resulting to an action of neglect of the civil protections of people, constitutional?

There shouldn’t be sacrifice communities. By establishing a universal commercial  code, having the same minimum standards everywhere, that is no poisoning of our air or our water in our living environment, is a useful application of preemption. This being, is all in conformity with civil rights in constitutional law for the people, their property, regarding its natural ecosystems protections as a right and is upheld without compromising the legislative bodys’ power.

The giving up of certain natural rights has to do with inalienable rights and that forfeit is in exchange for protection of health, safety and welfare not for the profit of private entities or especially corporate money interests. That leads to social instability hence Art.10(NH Constitution) not an authoritarian martial law of a corporate state. These comments are to help you think. I leave you with these quotes of two contemporaries of their day.

Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Quote from Mary Baker Eddy( a daughter of the American Revolution), Science and Health with key to the scriptures page 106:7-

God has endowed man with inalienable rights, among which are self-government, reason, and conscience. Man is properly self-governed only when he is guided rightly and governed by his Maker, divine Truth and Love.

There is good reason in principle of the virtue in this Amendment 40. It strengthens the rights of equality. Written as it stands corporate money can’t touch it, as it should be. There is a debt to be paid back to the people from our representative form of democracy out of the respect and good faith to their constituents, the people who hold the note out of the contract made by government with the private corporate. The buck stops here. It’s now the peoples’ mandate to decide in 2020 on Amendment 40. Your duty is to pass CACR8 then tell the Senate this is the people’s will to be respectfully granted this right.

 

Douglas Darrell 

NHCRN Board Member

Center Barnstead

 

*Editor’s note: Derived from 1868 court decision that insured that local governments could have regulatory power only over areas explicitly allowed by state and federal government.

Avatar photo

As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.